Voice mail is an integral part of enterprise communications in which a caller leaves an audio message in a voice mailbox when a called party is absent, unable or unwilling to talk to the caller at that particular time. Unlike a phone conversation, which is a two-party, bi-directional communication, voice mail is a two-party unidirectional communication as the party retrieving the voice mail message cannot ask questions if there are any ambiguities in the information left for them.
Moreover, in existing voice mail systems voice mail messages are retrieved linearly, meaning that the person retrieving the message often has to listen to an entire message a second time in order to get a particular item of information. Even in systems having the capability for the caller to leave a call back number, the number is left sequentially with the voice mail message, effectively as another short voice message.
There are proposals to use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to make access to voice mail more efficient. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 6,249,765 to Adler, et. al entitled “System and method for extracting data from audio messages”, and U.S. Pat. 6,529,870 to Mikkilineni entitled “Identifying voice mail messages using speaker identification”, both of which are hereby incorporated by reference, describe systems in which ASR is integrated into voice mail. There have also been proposals to use ASR to transcribe voice mail into electronic text and then have Information Retrieval (IR) technology decipher the caller's intention and other aspects of the message content, as described in for instance, but not limited to, U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,643 to Groner entitled “Speech recognition system and method for converting voice mail messages to electronic mail messages”, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Despite the promise of easy and convenient access to voice mail that such “intelligent” Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)/Information Retrieval (IR) technologies systems offer, there are disadvantages.
Firstly, ASR and IR systems are often expensive additions to a voice mail system. Secondly, ASR/IR is not yet mature enough to handle the diversity of speaking styles and content encountered in most enterprises. Thirdly, in the ASR/IR model, a third party agent, usually in the form of a software application, is introduced to interpret the caller's message and intentions when the caller is the one who best knows what is intended and which parts of the message are important. A better system model is one in which the caller, who already knows what is intended and which parts of the message have increased importance, is facilitated to annotate the message.
What is needed is a cost effective method that allows the caller to annotate the voicemail they are leaving, at the time they leave it, thereby allowing the message recipient a choice of how to retrieve messages including being able to prioritize messages, hear only summaries of message and to have random access to specific information embedded in messages, such as names and call back numbers.